Acquiring items of commerce takes time. To save time, consumers often classify items in categories, and attempt to purchase multiple items from a category on each shopping trip. The categories are generally based on the type of store that sells the item. For example, a consumer may have a category for grocery store, home improvement store, office supply store, clothes store, and so on. Thus, the consumer may save time by buying more than one item on each trip to the store.
Consumers often attempt to classify items broadly in order to save additional time. Purchases of food, clothes, home improvements, and office supplies may often be made in a single variety type store. The problem with such variety stores is that there is often less of a selection of a particular good than in a specialty store. The consumer may still have to spend time and money on trips to specialty stores to get the items he desires.
Mail order catalogs emerged in part to help consumers save time and money shopping for goods by offering purchase of products by mail. By purchasing through mail order catalogs, a consumer could save time on travel and location of the goods. Not only were mail order catalogs time savers for many consumers, they provided the capability to purchase generally inaccessible products. For example, early catalogs such as Montgomery Wards' catalog offered items that the consumer could not easily acquire because stores may not have been close, and transportation may have been limited.
Many of the early catalogs offered a wide variety of goods, and the consumer generally enjoyed surfing the pages of the catalogs to ponder purchase of items he may not have otherwise had available to him. Even with the entertainment value of surfing a large catalog, purchasing was a time consuming activity nonetheless.
Electronic catalogs eventually emerged. The electronic catalogs frequently offer the same type of goods that its mail order counterpart offered. Vendors, catalog companies, and consumers all may benefit from the automation. The product vendor may have its products more widely distributed, and may have additional product distributors available to him. The catalog company may have the benefit of a larger and more accessible maketplace, alternative advertising methods, and lower cost of catalog creation and distribution. The consumer may have enhanced searching capability, perhaps a more extensive product list, as well as an incremental savings of time. A continuing problem, even with electronic catalogs, however, is that the consumer may need to visit multiple catalog sites to accomplish all of his online purchases. The need to visit multiple sites results in persistence of many of the traditional problems such as time to locate the item, and time to arrange the purchase, including entry of credit card number, name, and address.
To solve problems related to the need to purchase from many different catalog sites, electronic variety type sites have emerged that combine the products of a plurality of catalogs. One such site is www.catalogfavorites.com. While this and other similar sites may provide relatively more products than those utilizing the products of a single catalog, there are detriments to such sales models.
A particular detriment of a variety site may exist when there is more than one catalog (and distributor) offering the same product. In this situation, the site has the choice of choosing for itself the catalog that will receive credit for the sale and the distributor that will distribute the product. The alternative may be not listing the product at all. In either case, the consumer has no choice over who ultimately sells and distributes the product. The consumer may want to choose the distributor and catalog for a variety of reasons. The consumer may, for example, have received products that were broken during shipping, may have a family member working for one of the companies, a moral conflict with one of the companies, or may even own stock in one of the companies.
Sites such as www.carsdirect.com are similar to variety type catalog sites because they display products from more than one car dealer. However, some of the same problems exist with these sales models. The cars that carsdirect.com sells are obtained from the car dealers, and the consumer may have reason to choose which dealer will ultimately sell him the car.
Another problem with such electronic sales sites is that the consumer may still spend time to locate the site itself. The mere existence of electronic commerce sites on the Internet does not save a consumer time. Online searches for sites often take considerable time, and return thousands of entries many of which are entirely inappropriate. Even with automated selling, much time and effort is spent locating appropriate sites.
Thus, there is a need to provide improved methods of electronic commerce particularly those that save the consumer time and effort and give the consumer added control over the purchase.